Shortly after 9/11, Private Eye began a Warballs column to collect gratuitous references to the war on terror. Mostly these took the form of attempts in press releases to pin bad news of the type of, say, falling sales of tweed on the New York and Washington attacks. I shall always have a soft spot for the caravan retailer who claimed the terrorist strikes would signal good times ahead for his business as holidaymakers turned away from aeroplanes.
The trope now takes in the London bomb attacks (the Eye has a Bomb-balls column) but there is another trend emerging – the tagging of the threat of Muslim extremism to otherwise unconnected claims and arguments to make them sound more powerful or add a fresh spin. Witness the letter to the Times (via Harry's Place and Wardyblog) from Andrew Rosemarine of Salford that claimed extended drinking hours would "increase Muslim disaffection" and therefore concluded that "extended drinking hours may cause more terrorism."
The Tory backbencher John Hayes has in recent weeks written in the Spectator that Muslims are "right about Britain", or rather about his view of Britain as a nation under threat from a "metropolitan mix of gay rights and lager louts" (which really aren't the same thing). To be fair to Mr Hayes, the Muslims he was thinking of were the extremists' "decent co-religionists", but since it was the "decent co-religionists" he said were "the best hope of undermining the extremists at source" the argument was essentially the same: ignore me if you will but don't blame me if you get bombed again.
The award, if there is such a thing, for today's most over the top invocation of Islamic extremism goes, however, to leading US televangelist Pat Robertson for his call for the assassination of Hugo Chávez on the grounds that Venezuela, of which he is president, was becoming "a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism".
The claim is astonishing. The antiwar hard left and Muslim organisations showed it was possible to get around Marx's description of religion as the "opiate of the people" if there was sufficient antipathy to George Bush. But not even Afghanistan at its conflict-ridden peak managed to be both a "launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism" – at least not at the same time.
Still – like others before him – Robertson has realised there is nothing like a dash of Islamic extremism to give your old arguments a topical edge. Just like selling caravans, in fact.
